The western is an old, old genre in moviedom, the first specimens appearing almost as soon as films began to be made more than a century ago. In their early incarnations, those films tend to be simple affairs of cowboys versus Indians and sheriffs versus rustlers and badmen, not particularly critical, not particularly nuanced. But, beginning in the 1940s and extending into the golden era of the 1970s and beyond, westerns began to criticize contemporary politics through the lens of the past, one particularly pointed example being Arthur Penn’s 1970 film Little Big Man, which, like the novel that preceded it, updated the western film and the atrocities of western history to mirror events taking place in Vietnam.

Call them “contrarian westerns,” these films that turn Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, and “peace by the sword” on their ear. In this series, we’ll highlight a baker’s dozen such films, some well known, some all but forgotten even in their own day.

Here’s one of the many gems scattered throughout Little Big Man, just to set the proper contrarian mood. Yee-haw!1

To which let me append a perfectly contrarian-western message that I saw in a café in rural New Mexico seven years into the last presidency: “Yee-haw does not constitute a foreign policy.”